Movies I Haven’t Seen Yet – Eraser [1996]

by Nicholas Robinson

John Kruger (Arnold Schwarzenegger) works for the witness relocation program as a U.S. Marshal. His job is to remove all traces of the identity of any witness in the program and to, as called for, eliminate threats against any of those witnesses. John works alone and is the best at what he does. When Lee Cullen (Vanessa Williams), a high level executive with a U.S. weapons manufacturer, turns over evidence of illegal arms deals to the FBI, John is assigned to protect her. But they both soon find that the level of treason extends far past the Cyrex Corporation and into high levels of the government. John and Lee become the target of these money grubbing capitalist pigs and their survival depends upon John’s ability to protect both of them.- IMDB.com

Now, before I ramble on about how this was a great action movie, let me tell you, I am a huge Arnie (Arnold Schwarzenegger) fan. I have seen most of his movies and I find them to be generally good. Let me also tell you that although I am a huge Arnie fan, I still admit that objectively, the quality of his movies aren’t all that great, with a few exceptions. This is one of them. There is amazing action, a better than average story, good acting and some fun one-liners.

The action in this movie is amazing. I mean when the hero can fight an alligator and kill it (although it was with a gun), you know that you’ve got yourself some good action. The guns in this movie were also cool. I mean there were really only two non-realistic ones (i.e. the miniature rail gun and the nail grenade launcher) but they were really good (especially the miniature rail gun). My favourite part wasn’t really the rail gun itself, but the scope that could see through walls and skin and everything.

The story in this movie was as I said better than average. It had the generic action movie story, i.e. hero is introduced, hero meets girl in trouble, hero helps girl while screwing up his own life, awesome action, hero kills bad guys and saves girl, hero gets girl. However, this one had some cool aspects including the deep corruption of the government and inclusion of a once thought extremely minor character.

The acting in this movie was actually good. Arnie was his usual self, i.e. awesome killer/action person with tons of one-liner but James Caan was really good as Kruger’s corrupted mentor. Even at the end when he gets caught, he is still being his economic, emotionless character which he portrayed very well. A special mention goes to James Cromwell‘s two minutes on screen near the beginning. In those two minutes, he makes it known that he’s smart and also makes you feel his anger and resentment (which some actors can’t even do in ninety) and makes you wish he had more screen time.

Now, going into this movie, I knew that Arnie was going to be firing off one-liners faster than Usain Bolt can run 100m and they were horrible puns, but I found myself laughing at them. However, what I’m not sure is whether I was laughing because I found them funny, or if it was because they were so bad it was funny. Something tells me that it was the latter.

Overall, it is one of the better Arnie action movies that I recommend all action fans to watch.